


Root Cut

by Suaine



Category: Ninja Assassin (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-01
Updated: 2010-12-01
Packaged: 2017-10-13 11:34:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/136908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Suaine/pseuds/Suaine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the third time Mika comes to Raizo for help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Root Cut

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plazmah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plazmah/gifts).



Cutting the tree down to size was only one part of caring for a bonsai. It needed as much nurture as it needed boundaries, as much careful deliberation as it needed decisive action.

  


This, of all things, Mika did not understand. Living among the ruins of his clan, living with the ghosts of his past mistakes, was more than just a kind of atonement. Raizo felt a connection here that he could not find in the outside world, even though there was so much pain and betrayal in the memories of this place. Not all of the lessons he had learned here were wrong.

And some people needed killing.

For all her annoyance at the EU regulations tying the hands of law enforcement agencies, for all her frustration at the way German law interpreted the balance between individual rights and the safety of the community, Mika still believed in the justice of the system. Raizo did so as well, but he moved in the shadows of a different system entirely. And yet, sometimes they agreed so thoroughly that it scared him a little. When she burned with righteous fury, Mika was more dangerous than any assorted weaponry.

“I like what you've done with the place,” Mika said, standing under the crumbling, burned out doorway that once led to Ozunu's inner sanctum. She was carrying a purple plastic folder bursting with papers and assorted tidbits. A photo was dangerously close to sliding out of the bottom.

Raizo pointed at the image with his tiny bonsai scissors, his fingers caked in dirt instead of blood, for once. “That the guy you mentioned?”

Mika made a face and looked down at her precariously balanced research. “Yeah, that's him.” Her and Agent Maslow had been on the man's case for the better part of two months, but nothing had managed to stick. He was familiar to Raizo in a way – Ozunu had chosen children of a similar quality to raise into remorseless weapons. There was a lack in him, a certain emptiness that reminded Raizo of Takeshi – and of himself.

“Markus Schmidt,” Raizo read from the profile sheet Mika had handed him. “A cover name?”

Mika sighed. “He's got a list of aliases as long as my arm, but as far as we can tell, that's his real name. We've talked to his mother.”

Ah. Somehow after everything that happened Mika had held on to her notion of love – that a person who was loved, fiercely and unconditionally, couldn't be fundamentally rotten, that someone else's love negated the lack of humanity. It was the kind of conviction that was both liability and salvation.

Kiriko had had that same notion.

  


_After her death, Raizo locked the guilt and the love away and trained harder than any of his brothers and sisters. His thoughts strayed no further than the next lesson, his body taut with the need to atone, although he would not let his mind know what part he should regret. He pushed himself, always waiting for something to happen, to break._

 _He knew, as he caught Ozunu watching him, that there was little time left. Destiny was going to force a choice sooner rather than later and Raizo would be ready._

  


“This man doesn't deserve your pity,” Raizo said over tea. Mika took hers with too much sugar.

“It's not pity, you know.” She looked determined to convince him of something, but maybe she was too subtle or the idea simply too foreign, because Raizo felt unaffected. “Everyone deserves justice. We can't prove that he killed that girl, not conclusively.”

He heard the implication: that Raizo had killed, and done so with no remorse; that, if he deserved a chance at life, then so did this man, who still had the benefit of doubt on his side. But Raizo knew why she was here, asking for help despite her moral objections. Schmidt was as much a psychopath as any of the clan children, the difference being his unusual ambition. As a rule, people like them lived petty, often unremarkable lives. They made fairer tools than leaders.

“Is he a better man for being able to afford the better weapons?”

Maybe Ozunu had been like Schmidt, given a power he had no faculty to understand or wield with any sense of balance. In their hands, power was itself corruption, a blight seeping into everything it touched. Kiriko, who had been the most human out of all his brothers and sisters, had withered under it long before it killed her.

Mika sighed, leaned her head back to stare at the open sky above them. She looked torn between two impossible positions. “Look, I don't want to be that person, I don't want to come here and ask a... a magical ninja warrior-” She waved her hands in a complicated gesture, too complex for Raizo to decipher. “-to do what the law couldn't do.”

“And yet, here you are.” It was a statement of curious fact, not a taunt, but Mika frowned anyway, folding her arms around herself.

“Here I am. Which, by the way, is going to drive Brian nuts if he finds out. He still thinks you're going to either kill me or turn me into your creepy ninja bride.”

Raizo sipped at his tea to hide the upward curl of his mouth. “I have no intention of killing you.”

She smiled and Raizo took that as a victory. “So, what are we going to do about Schmidt?”

He shrugged. “I can't make that decision for you. I'm not good with moral judgments.” He thought about Kiriko and allowed himself to feel the guilt and the loss, for a moment. He did not trust himself to make the right choice.

“You got there in the end,” she said. Tapping her cup absently, she was miles away with her thoughts.

  


_Ozunu took him aside a few days after the lesson about balance and lightness. His feet were still sore, but thanks to Kiriko they were no longer bleeding. The scars he would probably have all his life, burned into his skin like the best lessons._

 _He expected a scolding for letting Kiriko soothe him. “Do you know why we do what we do? Do you know the history of the clans?”_

 _Raizo shook his head, unsure of the answer. He had learned of the assassin prince, of the mercenaries and the poor men who found their calling in the unsavory, the shadows of war. None of that explained why he was here._

 _“We are the nine. The clans each represent one of the kuji-kiri. We seek to understand the others in strife, to come into a fullness of being. Do you understand?”_

 _Raizo did not. There was only pain and death._

  


“I think he was insane,” Raizo said, later, as they trudged through the ruins of his former home. Mika shot him a sideways glance, a small smile on her lips, teasing him for stating the obvious. “I think they all are. They're corrupted. They convinced themselves that they had some higher calling, a sacred mission to be carried out by killing indiscriminately.”

“And they corrupt their stolen children in turn.” Mika shivered and Raizo wondered if it was the cold.

“That bothers you, doesn't it? Taking children that would not be missed, children with no futures?”

Mika rolled her eyes. “Not much of an improvement, if you ask me.” She sounded glib, but there was an edge to her expression.

“What do you want to do about Schmidt?” She looked almost relieved to change the topic back to her own personal demon.

“He's a danger to society the longer he's allowed to continue his business. He's protected by too many powerful people who like to make use of his ruthlessness and the law can't touch him.” She was trying to convince herself, Raizo already knew all this.

“What does Agent Maslow think?”

Mika grimaced. “He's given up on the case, got drunk, and told me in many words not to try anything stupid like seek you out to put a hit on Schmidt's head. But he doesn't have any better ideas either.”

“And you?” They had done this before, played this game twice, with a serial killer targeting young children and a mafia boss too well protected to convict. The difference with Schmidt was that his crimes, awful as they were, had not involved murder until very recently.

She sighed. “I think I- how could I live with myself if he killed anyone else? And he will, I know that, he's a time bomb with a short fuse.”

“You want me to take him out.”

Mika turned away from him, her arms crossed in front of her. “No, I don't want that. But it's necessary and you have to do it.” There was something more in her voice than just the guilt and confusion of a moral impossibility. When Kiriko had asked him to leave with her it had had much the same feeling.

Although he had learned many important lessons since then, Raizo still didn't know what the right answer was, so he went with what was familiar. “I'll do it.”

And in that instance he knew it was the wrong thing to say.

  


To cut the roots of a potted tree was at once a dangerous and a necessary task. There was always a chance that the shock and upheaval would kill the plant, but without such action, a slow withering death was inevitable.


End file.
